The exponential growth of mobile data, both in terms of mobile subscribers and mobile data traffic, requires substantial increase of network capability and efficiency. The rapid uptake of Smartphone subscribers and the launch of different types of mobile devices such as machine type communication (MTC) devices put additional pressure on the existing mobile data network. Specifically, applications in modern Smartphones constantly poll the network for background traffic even when users are inactive, resulting in huge amount of signaling traffic. Today, the network faces network congestion problems resulting in lower data rate, failed calls and slow response time.
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is an improved universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) that provides higher data rate, lower latency and improved system capacity. In the LTE system, an evolved universal terrestrial radio access network includes a plurality of base stations, referred as evolved Node-Bs (eNBs), communicating with a plurality of mobile stations, referred as user equipment (UE). A UE may communicate with a base station or an eNB via the downlink and uplink. The downlink (DL) refers to the communication from the base station to the UE. The uplink (UL) refers to the communication from the UE to the base station.
Despite the improvements in the LTE system, it still faces capacity and efficiency problems with the rapid growth of different mobile users. Moreover, the UE in the mobile network faces increasing problems of battery efficiency. The modern Smartphone supports various types of mobile applications. These applications have different traffic characteristics. A lot of them do not use the network resource efficiently and cause the UE battery efficiency drop dramatically. In the third generation (3G) mobile network, a user device (UE) needs to perform a series of signaling procedures for data transmission, such as the radio resource connection (RRC), the attach procedure, the identification procedure, the authentication procedure, and data path establishment procedures. These procedures consumes large amount of network resource as well as UE batteries. Many mobile data applications today send and receive small data but still requires large amount of signaling process. Another example is MTC applications, which generate regular data transmissions at predefined time intervals and perform attach/detach procedures in the network for each transmission. These applications significantly increases network signaling overhead. UE battery life becomes a major concern because many of the background traffic and background applications are not optimized for battery consumption. Optimization for UE power consumption is required with the increased popularity of various mobile applications.